4.4.07

Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux

From this poem by Louis Aragon from 1946 two lines in a new translation by myself:
Mon bel amour mon cher amour ma déchirure
Je te porte dans moi comme un oiseau blessé

My beautiful love, my dear love, you who tear me apart,
I carry you in myself like a wounded bird.
For some reason, these two lines from the poem – which do so much to create the image of a love apparently full of pain and contradictory impulses – have stayed with me for many years, while the rest of the poem has not.

The ending, which sounds like a punch line from a French chanson, is actually on the flat side:
Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux
Mais c'est notre amour à tous les deux

There is no happy love,
But this is our love.
The very last line could become more prosy to reflect the French more directly, e.g. "But it is the love between the two of us" or "But it is the love the two of us share," but that doesn't do much, does it?

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